Black Voices are a Necessary Aspect of National Culture
The cultural mosaic illustrated by Canada’s Black literature is a multifaceted unification, painted in decolonialization, immigration, violence, nationalism, and imagination, but which still struggles for viability against the potent pop cultural images of the American mass media. Pop culture media products contribute to the glorification and celebration of stereotypes such as southern black slaves, perpetuated by both the American entertainment industry and by Canadian mass media’s erasure of the history of Black slavery in Canada (Simpson 64). The effect of these products is to negate and expunge the reality of Black Canadians, and contributes to continued racism and marginalization of this diverse subculture. How have messages, such as the portrayal of Canada’s underground railroad as gateway to a place of salvation, shaped our societal imagination of Black history? And how do we then reflect those messages back within the context of historical and modern lived realities of our Black population, when Black Canadian authors are still challenged to be accepted by the publishing industry (McNeill 3)?
Contemporary Canadian Black authors accentuate the realism of being Black in Canada, bringing both new media effects and mythological pop culture to a national dialogue and providing cultural understanding critical to changing this pervasive mythology. Canadian author George Elliott Clarke has been celebrated for his direct and vibrant portrayals of Africadian culture, and has spoken at length on the diversity of Black Canadian culture, supporting and encouraging Black Canadian literary endeavours. His writings are a small but potent aspect of the dialogue needed to provide diversity within Canadian literature. Clarke’s thoughts on Black Canadian cultural diversity and the parallel literary exploration of related scholarship spurred by this dialogue, mirrors historical and existing intergenerational trauma and racism and provides contextual depth to emerging Black Canadian literature (Clarke 8). He says the Canadian slave narrative in Victorian literature is ignored because it seems not to exist, perceived as specific to America. “In Canadian literature - and history - then, the slave narrative … seems literally out of place, always exilic, always exotic. It is a silently painful wound, an anthology of the unspeakable that cannot enter into our anthologies” (14).
Clarke writes there are similarities and experiences unique to both Canadian and American Black slaves. He emphasizes neither Canadian nor American literature exists in singularity, but must consider the Canadian voices in American literature and vice versa (11). He examines a range of Canadian literature describing the American slave trade, but which also seems to deny the Canadian experience, legitimizing Canadian racism. Clarke’s words will serve as the best description here:
Indeed, by training their righteous anger so squarely on the squalid inadequacies of the American Republic, the proto-African-Canadian slave narrative authors helped to obscure European-Canadian racism … Their writings supported and inspired white Canadian paternalism, sentimentality, and romanticism regarding African Americanism, attitudes still au courant today. (Clarke 24)
For one author, the Canadian or American Black voice is less important than the cultural expression for new generations of Black youth. Author Zetta Elliott says, “If we do not create stories that expose the beauty and complexity of our varied realities, we will indeed remain trapped by the ‘fictions’ created by those outside our cultures and communities” (20). Elliott grew up in Toronto, but now lives in New York. She writes about a childhood imagination richened by literature, but which failed to provide a mirror for her young black self. The adventures of distant lands and magical transportations were only for white children as the heroes and heroines of those distant lands and magical gardens were white.
While Black Canadian authors have stood against the American idea of Blackness, David Chariandy argues they’ve simultaneously illuminated “the conflicting and mutually constitutive scrips of national identity and diasporic identification” (1). Chariandy argues that representations of the US south in the works of Canadian authors asserts a broader “unified” black experience, positions political and cultural Black Canadian landscapes, and contests the myth of a colour blind, post-racial Canada. By doing so, he asks, is the transnational and specific forms of anti-blackness in Canada obscured (68)?
The invisibility of Black Canadian literature is rooted in erasure of 200 years of slavery and reflective of the persistent but hushed racism present throughout Canada’s history and culminating in current movements such as Black Lives Matter. Canada’s Black literary community is coming into its own heritage and identity in national and transnational pop culture, a necessary part of claiming their piece of Canada’s cultural mosaic and reclaiming Black Canadian history, which, according to Rinaldo Walcott (82), is intricately tied to capitalism. Black Radical Tradition, he says, “… is a confrontation with capitalism, land theft, and systems of knowledge conceived and put in place to render Black and African peoples less than human and ultimately non-human” (83).
While the US has a prolific repository of Black literature, including the testaments of slaves and Blacks throughout its history, Canada’s history has been forgotten by its historians and only recently recognized as a significant aspect to not only Black culture, but also our national history. Historian Harvey Amani Whitfield examines how the historical community has failed to capture the essence of Black slavery in the Maritimes, and suggests those stories were silenced by an archive privileged by the words, accounts and opinions of society’s most powerful (328). “How can we tell the stories of individual slaves using limited source material and an archive that rarely allows slaves to speak for themselves unless mediated through the pen of a white person (326)?
Canada’s Black authors have struggled with an invisible past that still permeates our cultural reflection of Black Canada. Reconciling that past as a part of Canadian Black culture in literature is integral to reclaiming cultural identity. Canadians cannot embrace understanding and inclusion without a contextual consideration of misunderstanding and racism. As Katrin Berndt writes of the central preoccupations of Black Canadian writing in Citizens and the Community: Dimensions of Democratic Justice in Contemporary Black Canadian Writing, (2017), “The critical agendas … challenge hegemonic definitions of citizenship in history and present-day culture by drawing attention to the racialized experiences, and to reveal how transnational relations have been shaped, and continue to influence, how the Canadian community is imagined” (24).
Contemporary Canadian Black authors bring to light the realism of being Black in Canada, and provide cultural understanding critical to changing this pervasive mythological pop culture, but which need to become a naturalized conversation within the national cultural and literary dialogue. “The entitlement of the critics and publishers and editors in the industry is preventing the breaking out of ethnically diverse writers who have so much to contribute to Canadian literature (McNeil 6). Enhancing awareness of diverse Canadian literature could stimulate more demand from readers, but publishers should also have mandates to track diversity among authors, to encourage more diversity in their employees, and to create standards encouraging diversity in acquisitions and published material.
Works Cited
Berndt, Katrin. “Citizens and the Community: Dimensions of Democratic Justice in Contemporary Black Canadian Writing.” Zeitschrift Für Kanada-Studien, vol. 37, no. 1 [66], 2017, pp. 21–39. EBSCOhost, library.macewan.ca/full-record/mzh/202017964145.
Chariandy, David. “‘Against the South’: The Mississippis of Black Writing in Canada.” The Global South, vol. 9, no. 1, July 2016, pp. 62–68. EBSCOhost, library.macewan.ca/full-record/edspmu/edspmu.S1932865615100044.
Clarke, George Elliott. “‘This Is No Hearsay’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de La Société Bibliographique Du Canada, vol. 43, no. 1, 2005, pp. 7–32. EBSCOhost, library.macewan.ca/full-record/mzh/2005630532.
Elliott, Zetta. “Decolonizing the Imagination.” Horn Book Magazine, vol. 86, no. 2, Mar. 2010, pp. 16–20. EBSCOhost, library.macewan.ca/full-record/a9h/48273864.
McNeil, Sarah, “Lack of Ethnic Diversity in Canadian Publishing.” The Structure of the Book Publishing Industry in Canada, Pub 371, Fall, 2017, pp. 1-7. Doi http://journals.sfu.ca/courses/index.php/pub371/issue/view/1
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, “Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An Exchange.” Studies in Social Justice, vol. 12, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 75–89. EBSCOhost, doi:10.26522/ssj.v12i1.1830.
Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “White Archives, Black Fragments: Problems and Possibilities in Telling the Lives of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes.” The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 323–345. EBSCOhost, library.macewan.ca/full-record/edspmu/edspmu.S1710109320300267.